Advice.txt

Advice

I have had several e-mails or in-person questions about how to do well in 2ME3/2AA4.  I thought I would record my thoughts here for anyone that is interested.  If you have additional advice to offer, or comments on my advice, please contribute to this thread.

Overall my advice is to identify your weaknesses and take steps to address these weaknesses.  Of course, identifying weaknesses is not an easy task.  It is made more difficult because often, for practical reasons, your target has to be "good enough" not "mastery."  You might consider the following steps to identify your weaknesses:

1. Go through the previous midterm examination and "reverse engineer" the concept being tested by each question.  The questions are each intended to highlight a concept from the course material.  If you can identify the concept, then you know you have some understanding.  You can then ask yourself in what other ways the question could have been asked or varied.  If in your self-testing you had an incorrect answer for the question, you can investigate why you got it wrong and take steps to learn the material better.

2. You can go through the topics and slides covered in class.  If there is anything you don't understand, you should follow up to increase your understanding.  For this to work, the review has to be an active process.  If you just skim the notes, they will probably look fine.  You have to read them very critically, bullet point by bullet point.

3. There are exercises in the textbook that you should try doing.  Doing questions is a more active approach to learning.  Just reading isn't enough, you need to apply your knowledge.

4. Apply your knowledge on the qualities of specification to an actual specification.  Repeating a definition is not enough, especially for a multiple choice test.  You need to know how to apply the definition.  I think the best way to learn this is to actively use it for something.  An example of an active exercise would be to write your own formal specification for something.

5. Another active activity would be to look at existing design and critique them.  Pick an open source project and look at the interface to the modules.  Do you like it?  What could have then done differently?  What is the quality of the specification?

As the bullet points above illustrate, I'm a big believer in active tasks for studying.  Making summary notes can be very helpful, if you put thought into your summary.  If you are just copying bullet points, it might be too passive to actually bring you a deeper understanding.

Once you have identified your areas of weaknesses, the next step is to determine how to strengthen those areas.  Ask your TAs questions.  My understanding is that the second hour of the tutorials is often not utilized.  Utilize it!  Post questions on on Avenue.  The discussion this year hasn't been great, but I'm sure that someone will get back to you to offer their help.

You can also ask me questions or make an appointment.  I really like questions in-class, because then I can dynamically change the focus of the lecture to address the area of concern.  The more you communicate your problems to me, the more I can hopefully do to help.

Best wishes.

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Dr. Spencer Smith